Strawberries, Cream & Other Things.

This time out I wanted to see the effect of fruit consumption on blood glucose when mixed with other foods (which would be typical of most people’s eating patterns). The strawberries is overwhelmingly carbohydrate. According to the USDA nutrient database 100 grams of strawberries is composed of:

fat 0.30 grams

protein 0.67 grams

carb 7.68 grams

And the carbohydrate portion is primarily composed of the following sugars:

sucrose 0.47 grams

glucose 1.99 grams

fructose 2.44 grams

The other elements of the meal were very fat and protein centered (crème fraiche, eggs & sheep’s milk). Here’s a table with the results:

Note that initial reading was taken after not having eaten for something like 16 hours. I had no breakfast that day, so the previous evening’s supper was the last thing i had to eat. Probably as a result, even after 4 and a half hours my blood glucose hadn’t come all the way back down to the starting point. Here’s the chart:

The change is actually pretty moderate, despite it being an entire pound (454 grams) of strawberries. It seems to go up and down a bit and I’m not sure if that’s measurement error of some sort or just caused by the body’s metabolic variation and things don’t just go straight up or straight down sometimes. Whatever the cause, it appeared the increase in blood glucose was neither very dramatic nor very long lived.